A Return

Hello world.

It's been a while, and a topsy-turvey spring-into-summer in which life got in the way of blogging. Both my parents have been in the hospital at different points in the last couple of months with their own worrying health problems. Luckily, my father has come through the worst of his pneumonia with only the need to put on some more weight to bring him back to normal. My mother stays more of a long-term worry and a last-minute trip home recently showed me how difficult things may be. It's never easy getting old or watching those close to you get old, and feels even more difficult when you have to start thinking about questions around your loved one's care.

On a positive side, I've also spent the last many weeks struggling with a different sort of problem. Happily, I am pregnant, bringing with it lots of excitement but also an entirely different relationship to food. I've been fairly sick a good part of the time so far, and even more than the emotional strain of family problems, the physical impossibility of keeping up a food blog during the worst of the sickness was a persuading force on the blog break. It is difficult when the most exciting thing you can report for a week was that you one night felt up to eating 11 Ritz crackers and having a sweet mint tea, and then spent the next 5 nights refusing any proximity to food.

At 20 weeks now, things have evened out though still aren't perfect. Food has more of a necessity than before - I need to eat dinner by 7pm or else I'm at risk of cleaning out the nearest cupboard without any discrimination for what I'm eating. It fills my tummy, but doesn't lend itself to creative cooking and experimenting with new ideas. I'm sure life will have many more changes once baby is here, and not just on the food front.


Mr A&N (who has been wonderful throughout, please note, dear reader) and I did get to grab two weeks away in France as something of a last hurrah before family life changed. Although the pregnancy eating guidelines seem like a full-frontal attack on the French diet (no soft or blue-tinged cheeses...no rare meat...no cured meats...no liver...no pate...lay off the wine) I bought tins of foie gras and forbidden drinks home as my souvenirs, to be indulged in in 4-5 months time. We also got to hone our parenting skills on the farm we stayed at, adopting a hen and her six chicks. They would be found outside our door first thing in the morning for the first of their feeds, and any walks around the grounds were spent with the whole two- legged family following behind our each step. Maybe not perfect practice for a human baby, but it felt nice to be needed.